Many online systems, such as social networking systems and other social media systems, allow users to connect to and communicate with other users. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and that include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. An online system may allow a user to easily communicate and to share content with other users by allowing the user to post content on the online system for presentation to the other users. Content posted on the online system by the user (i.e., user-provided content) may be declarative information provided by the user, status updates, images, photographs, videos, text data, any other information the user wishes to share with other users of the online system such as links to news stories or other external webpages, or a combination thereof. User-provided content may also include sponsored content that a sponsoring user (e.g., an advertiser) requests to be presented to other users of the online system who are not necessarily connected with the sponsoring user.
To ensure that users have a high-quality experience, many online systems maintain content policies that prohibit or control user-provided content with links to misleading, disruptive, sensational, spammy, objectionable, offensive, suggestive, violent, illegal, unintelligible, malicious, and/or other types of low-quality webpages. Unfortunately, less scrupulous users of these online systems, especially those with financial incentives, often ignore such content policies and continue to post content to the online systems that contains links to low-quality webpages. For example, on some online systems, purveyors of ad-farm webpages (e.g., webpages that contain mostly advertisements and little quality content) are often the source of content posts or advertisements that contain links to low-quality webpages. The instant disclosure, therefore, identifies and addresses a need for systems and methods that detect and manage user-provided content that contains links to ad-farm webpages and other types of low-quality webpages.